streaming media Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: ATSC 3.0 OTA Meets OTT

Posted on 27th July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ASTC 3.0 has taken the bold move to merge RF-delivered services with internet-delivered services. Branded as ‘NextGen TV’, the idea that viewers shouldn’t need to know which path their service comes by is a welcome shift from the days of needing to select the right input on your TV. We’ve covered here before the technical details of ATSC 3.0 but today we’re looking the practical side of delivering such a service.

In this Streaming Media video, Nadine Krefetz hosts a conversation with Madeleine Noland from ASTC, Todd Achilles from Evoca TV, Jim DeChant from News Press & Gazette Broadcasting aswell as Sassan Pejhan. They start by highlighting that one reason ATSC 3.0 was developed over the previous ATSC 1.0 is that it opens up the possibility of delivering HDR and/or UHD along with Dolby Atomos.

Given ATSC 3.0 uses the same MPEG DASH delivery that online streaming services use, one question is why use ATSC 3.0 at all. The benefit of broadcast medium is in the name. There’s extreme efficiency in reaching thousands or millions of people with one transmitter which ATSC 3.0 uses to its advantage. In ASTC 3.0’s case, transmitters typically reach 40 miles. The panel discusses the way in which you can split up your bandwidth to deliver different services with different levels of robustness. Doing this means you can have a service that targets reception on mobile devices whilst keeping a high bandwidth, more delicately modulated channel for your main service intended for delivery to the home.

Not unlike the existing technologies used by satellite and cable providers such as SkyQ in the UK, an internet connection can be used to deliver user-specific adverts which is an important monetisation option that is needed to keep in step with the streaming services that it can work in tandem with. Madeleine explains that ATSC has created APIs for apps to query TV-specific functions like whether it’s on or off but these are the only ways in which app development for ATSC 3.0 differs from other web-based app development.

Finishing up the conversation, the panel discusses the similarities and differences to 5G.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Madeleine Noland President, Advanced Television Systems Committee Inc.
	Todd Achilles CEO, Evoca TV
	Jim DeChant VP Technology, News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting
	Sassan Pejhan VP of Emerging Technologies, ATEME
	Moderator: Nadine Krefetz Contributing Editor, Streaming Media Magazine

Video: The ROI of Deploying Multiple Codecs

Posted on 20th July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Adding a new codec to your streaming service is a big decision. It seems inevitable that H.264 will be around for a long time and that new codecs won’t replace it, but just take their share of the market. In the short term, this means your streaming service may also need to deliver H.264 and your new codec which will add complexity and increase CDN storage requirements. What are the steps to justifying a move to a new codec and what’s the state of play today?

In this Streaming Media panel, Jan Ozer is joined by Facebook’s Colleen Henry, Amnon Cohen-Tidhar from Cloudinary and Anush Moorthy from Netflix talk about their experiences with new codecs and their approach to new Codecs. Anush starts by outlining the need to consider decoder support as a major step to rolling out a new codec. The topic of decoder support came up several times during this panel in discussing the merits of hardware versus software decoding. Colleen points out that running VP9 and VVC is possible, but some members of the panel see a benefit in deploying hardware – sometimes deploying on devices like smart TVs, hardware decoding is a must. When it comes to supporting third party devices, we hear that logging is vitally important since when you can’t get your hands on a device to test with, this is all you have to help improve the experience. It’s best, in Facebook’s view, to work closely with vendors to get the most out of their implementations. Amnon adds that his company is working hard to push forward improved reporting from browsers so they can better indicate their capabilities for decoding.

Colleen talks about the importance of codec switching to enhance performance at the bottom end of the ABR ladder with codecs like AV1 with H264 at the higher end. This is a good compromise between the computation needed for AV1 and giving the best quality at very low bitrates. But Anush points out that storage will increase when you start using two codecs, particularly in the CDN so this needs to be considered as part of the consideration of onboarding new codecs. Dropping AV1 support at higher bitrates is an acknowledgement that we also need to consider the cost of encoding in terms of computation.

The panel briefly discusses the newer codecs such as MPEG VVC and MPEG LCEVC. Colleen sees promise in VVC in as much as it can be decoded in software today. She also says good things about LCEVC suggesting we call it an enhancement codec due to the way it works. To find out more about these, check out this SMPTE talk. Both of these can be deployed as software decoders which allow for a way to get started while hardware establishes itself in the ecosystem.

Colleen discusses the importance of understanding your assets. If you have live video, your approach is very different to on-demand. If you are lucky enough to have an asset that is getting millions upon millions of views, you’ll want to compress every bit out of that, but for live, there’s a limit to what you can achieve. Also, you need to understand how your long-tail archive is going to be accessed to decide how much effort your business wants to put into compressing the assets further.

The video comes to a close by discussing the Alliance of Open Media’s approach to AV1 encoders and decoders, discussing the hard work optimising the libAV1 research encoder and the other implementations which are ready for production. Colleen points out the benefit of webassembly which allows a full decoder to be pushed into the browser and the discussion ends talking about codec support for HDR delivery technologies such as HDR10+.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Colleen Henry Cobra Commander of Facebook Video Special Forces.
	Anush Moorthy Manager, Video & Imagine Encoding Netflix
	Amnon Cohen-Tidhar Senior Director or Video Architecture, Cloudinary
	Moderator: Jan Ozer Principal, Stremaing Learning Center Contributing Editor, Streaming Media

Video: Workflow Evolution Within the CDN

Posted on 22nd June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The pandemic has shone a light on CDNs as they are the backbone of much of what we do with video for streaming and broadcast. CDNs aim to scale up in a fast, sophisticated way so you don’t have to put in the research to achieve this yourself. This panel from the Content Delivery Summit sees Dom Robinson bringing together Jim Hall from Fastly with Akamai’s Peter Chave, Ted Middleton from Amazon and Paul Tweedy from BBC Design + Engineering.

The panel discusses the fact that although much video conferencing traffic being WebRTC isn’t supported, there are a lot of API calls that are handled by the CDN. In fact, over 300 trillion API calls were made to Amazon last year. Zoom and other solutions do have an HLS streaming option that has been used and can benefit from CDN scaling. Dom asks whether people’s expectations have changed during the pandemic and then we hear from Paul as he talks a little about the BBC’s response to Covid.

THE CTA’s Common Media Client Data standard, also known as CTA 5004, is a way for a video player to pass info back to the CDN. In fact, this is so powerful that it can provide highly granular real-time reports for customers but also enables hints to be handed back from the players so the CDNs can pre-fetch content that is likely to be needed. Furthermore, having a standard for logging will be great for customers who are multi-CDN and need a way to match logs and analyse their system in its entirety. This work is also being extended, under a separate specification to be able to look upstream in a CDN workflow to understand the status of other systems like edge servers.

The panel touches on custom-made analytics, low latency streaming such as Apples LL-HLS and why it’s not yet been adopted, current attempts in the wild to bring HLS latency down, Edge computing and piracy.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Peter Chave Principal Architect, Akamai Technologies
	Paul Tweedy Lead Architect, Online Technology Group, BBC Design + Engineering
	Ted Middleton Global Leader – Specialized Solution Architects, Edge Services Amazon
	Jim Hall Principal Sales Engineer, Fastly
	Moderator: Dom Robinson Director and Creative Firestarter, id3as Contributing Editor, StreamingMedia.com, UK

Video: Understanding the World of Ad Tech

Posted on 27th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Advertising has been the mainstay of TV for many years. Like it or loathe it, ad-support VoD (AVoD) delivers free to watch services that open up content to a much wider range of people than otherwise possible just like ad-supported broadcast TV. Even people who can afford subscriptions have a limit to the number of services they will subscribe to. Having an AVoD offering means you can draw people in and if you also have SVoD, there’s a path to convince them to sign up.

To look at where ad tech is today and what problems still exist, Streaming Media contributing editor Nadine Krefetz has brought together Byron Saltysiak from WarnerMedia, Verizon Media’s Roy Firestone, CBS Interactive’s Jarred Wilichinksy and Newsy’s Tony Brown to share their daily experience of working with OTT ad tech.

Nadine is quick to ask the panel what they feel the weakest link is in ad tech. ‘Scaling up’ answered Jarred who’s seen from massive events how quickly parts of the ad ecosystem fail when millions of people need an ad break at the same time. Bryon adds that with the demise of flash came the loss of an abstraction layer. Now, each platform has to be targetted directly leading to a lot of complexity. Previously, as long as you got flash right, it would work on all platforms. Lastly, redundancy came up as a weakness. Linked to Jarred’s point about the inability to scale easily, the panel’s consensus is they are far off broadcast’s five-nines uptime targets. In some ways, this is to be expected as IT is a more fragmented, faster-moving market than consumer TVs making it all the harder to keep up and match the changing patterns.

A number of parts of the conversation centred around ad tech as an ecosystem. This is a benefit and a drawback. Working in an ecosystem means that as much as the streaming provider wants to invest in bolstering their own service to make it able to cope with millions upon millions of requests, they simply can’t control what the rest of the ecosystem does and if 2 million people all go for a break at once, it doesn’t take much for an ad provider’s servers to collapse under the weight. On the other hand, points out Byron, what is a drawback is also a strength whereby streaming has the advantage of scale which broadcasters don’t. Roy’s service delivered one hundred thousand matches last year. Byron asks how many linear channels you’d need to cover that many.

Speed is a problem given that the ad auction needs to happen in the twenty seconds or so leading up to the ad being shown to the viewer. With so many players, things can go wrong starting off simply with slow responses to requests. But also with ad lengths. Ad breaks are built around 15 seconds segments so it’s difficult when companies want 6 or 11 seconds and it’s particularly bad when five 6-second ads are scheduled for a break: “no-one wants to see that.”

Jarred laments that despite the standards and guidelines available that “it’s still the wild west” when it comes to ad quality and loudness where viewers are the ones bearing the brunt of these mismatched practices.

Nadine asks about privacy regulations that are increasingly reducing the access advertisers have to viewer data. Byron points out that they do in some way need a way to identify a user such that they avoid showing them the same ad all the time. It turns out that registered/subscribed users can be tracked under some regulations so there’s a big push to have people sign up.

Other questions covered by the panel include QA processes, the need for more automation in QA, how to go about starting your own service, dealing with Roku boxes and how to deal with AVoD downloaded files which, when brought online, need to update the ad servers about which ads were watched.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Tony Brown Chief of Staff, Newsy
	Jarred Wilichinsky SVP Global Video Monetization and Operations, CBS Interactive
	Byron Saltysiak VP of Video and Connected Devices, WarnerMedia
	Roy Firestone Principal Product Manger, Verizon Media
	Nadine Krefetz Contributing Editor, Streaming Media

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